Power Consumption

Cooling modern video cards is becoming more and more difficult, especially with users asking for a quiet cooling solution, which is why engineers are now paying much more attention to the power consumption of new video-card designs. An optimized fan-profile is also one of the few things board vendors can create to impress with reference designs where they are prohibited from making changes to the thermal solution or components on the card.

For this test, we measured the power consumption of the graphics card via the PCI-Express power connector(s) and PCI-Express bus slot only. A Keithley Integra 2700 digital multimeter with 6.5-digit resolution was used for all measurements. Again, the values here only reflect the card's power consumption as measured at its DC inputs, not that of the whole system.

We chose Crysis 2 as a standard test representing typical 3D gaming usage because it offers the following: very high power draw; high repeatability; is a current game that is supported on all cards because of its DirectX 9 roots; drivers are actively tested and optimized for it; supports all multi-GPU configurations; test runs in a relatively short time and renders a non-static scene with variable complexity.

Power consumption results of other cards on this page are measurements of the respective reference design.

Our results were based on the following tests:

• Idle: Windows 7 Aero sitting at the desktop (1280x1024, 32-bit) with all windows closed and drivers installed. Card left to warm up in idle mode until power draw was stable.
• Multi-monitor: Two monitors connected to the tested card, both using different display timings. Windows 7 Aero sitting at the desktop (1280x1024 32-bit) with all windows closed and drivers installed. Card left to warm up in idle mode until power draw was stable.
• Blu-ray Playback: Power DVD 9 Ultra was used at a resolution of 1920x1080 to play back the Batman: The Dark Knight disc with GPU acceleration turned on. Playback started around timecode 1:19, which has the highest data rates on the BD with up to 40 Mb/s. Playback was left running until power draw converged to a stable value.
• Average: Crysis 2 at 1920x1080, Extreme profile, representing a typical gaming power draw. Average of all readings (12 per second) while the benchmark was rendering (no title/loading screen).
• Peak: Crysis 2 at 1920x1080, Extreme profile, representing a typical gaming power draw. Highest single reading during the test.
• Maximum: Furmark Stability Test at 1280x1024, 0xAA. This results in a very high no-game power-consumption that can typically be reached only with stress-testing applications. The card was left running the stress test until power draw converged to a stable value.

Single-monitor idle power consumption of the R7 260X achieved new record levels, running at just 4W of power. Multi-monitor and Blu-ray power consumption is as bad as on most AMD cards because of suboptimal clock and voltage settings in the BIOS. While Blu-ray is improved over the HD 7790, multi-monitor is not, and anything comparable from NVIDIA's product stack is more than twice as efficient in those power states.

Gaming power is increased a bit from the HD 7790, which is as expected due to the higher clocks and performance, but overall performance per watt has actually dropped a lot. The HD 7790 delivered leading efficiency, but the R7 260X is now below the average when compared to the whole market. The good HD 7790 numbers in mind, I was a bit disappointed by the R7 260X's gaming power consumption.